This came home yesterday

In reply to wspohn :

I wonder what percent of people could match the series to my scrambled personal descriptions below...

NA, NB, NC, ND

Toaster

Anime

Coke Bottle

Jelly Bean

Honestly, the build quality, handling dynamics, and acquisition / operational cost are so far out in front of the competition that I don't really care how Mazda decides to style their products.

RX-8 = Grasshopper on crack...still bought one.

I know 02Pilot's is much higher end but to get in the door starting at 26.5K is a modern marvel.

Mazda, thank you so much for making wonderful and reasonably priced cars...you've been keeping me happy and saving me piles of money since 1986.

Nice. I really like the ND2. 

I haven't let myself go test drive one because I'm afraid I'll buy it vs waiting til closer to the end of the year. So I can check out other options that are being released.

In reply to z31maniac :

If that's your concern, you're right - don't drive one. It will be very hard to resist buying.

That said, I see some chatter on the Miata boards about greatly reduced inventory coming over this summer due to production and supplier issues, so finding one later may be tricky, even just for a test drive.

Beautiful car and great choice!

Just drove this at night for the first time. Very pleasantly surprised by how good the headlights are - this is white-tailed deer country, and they are rampant, along with all manner of other wildlife. This car has the adaptive LED light setup that auto-dims the high beams and swivels the lights around corners. I was somewhat concerned about how the lights would perform, given how low the car is, but it's really cool and does an excellent job.

Super jelly over here. Great color choice, too. 

I wouldn't kick that out of the garage.

Time for a little update. Hit 5k miles and did the first oil change yesterday. Super easy job, excellent access. Looking at the engine from above and below, there's very little that seems like it would be a difficult job on this, and from a service standpoint the packaging is not bad at all by modern standards - astonishing in such a small car.

Driving experience has been really good. The body moves around a lot on the suspension, and the car feels a bit overdamped on the Bilsteins, so there may be some suspension modification in the future. I don't want to do much, just make it feel a bit firmer in roll and take out a bit of the jiggle. Other than that, the only things I'm considering are adding a little sound deadening in the trunk - it's a giant kettle drum, and it echoes and amplifies road noise when it's empty - and possibly changing the exhaust for something a little more interesting. But for right now I'm just driving it; it's been mostly closed up through the summer due to the heat, but I think it will be really nice in the fall with the top down.

Awesome, glad to hear it's going well. A+ purchase. 

If you think your Bilsteins are overdamped, you should drive a 2016-17 soft top Club :) I'm a big fan of the stock suspension on your car, I think it's one of the best Mazda's ever put int the showroom. Making it firmer in roll is a set of sways, of course.

Sound control on "coupes" is harder than ragtops. I can check to see if we have a sound kit in the works, we have them for earlier models.

I love me an RF.

I love that the RF is essentially a targa top when you want, I don't love that it adds nearly 100 lbs to a car whose focus is supposed to be lightweight. 

Nice car. I'm 64 and have still never purchased a new car.
I've also never had a car loan so I got that going for me.

It probably has way more to do with me completely ignorant of new cars, because reasons, but it was the end of the first page here before I knew that was a Mazda.

I used to care.  I've lost that somewhere in the 41 years of my automotive career.

Keith, would you suggest sways rather than springs as the first step in managing the body roll? That was my thought, but I've read a lot of anecdotal (Miata.net) opinion that points toward springs first. I'd be interested in hearing about a sound control kit; again, I've read of a people doing a fairly effective job without too much material or effort, but it's all based on individual experience rather than testing.

z31maniac, I don't find the weight is an issue. It's such a light car compared to virtually anything else out there, and the ND2 engine makes more than enough power to cope with it. I'm 100% satisfied with the trade-off of an extra 100 pounds for the benefits of the hardtop (while still keeping a full-size trunk, no less).

I want one of these so badly.  How noisy is it on the highway with the top up compared to a Civic/Corolla or something like that?  Can you have a phone conversation on Bluetooth without having to shout over noise?  

In reply to ShinnyGroove (Forum Supporter) :

It's not bad, really. Hard for me to compare to a Civic or Corolla, as I haven't been in one in years, but I'm sure it's a bit louder than those. As noted, it's better when the trunk is full of luggage, so I'm sure a bit of easily-added sound deadening would help considerably. Generally I don't use the phone, but on the two or three occasions I've had to, it's surprisingly good because the audio system pumps the phone through the headrest speakers.

Oh, and speaking of sound, I should have mentioned that I did two small mods to the car, both sound-related. First, I removed the "sound tube" that Mazda uses to pump intake noise into the cabin. Not that the noise was objectionable, but the concept of it annoyed me, and the tube itself cluttered up the engine bay. I also replaced the pathetic factory horns with PIAA sport (500/600) horns in an effort to more effectively alert SUV drivers to my existence in their immediate proximity.

The RF top is actually an impressive piece of engineering. The NA/NB removable hardtop is something like 45 lbs and the soft top that stayed in place was about 40 (the NB is a bit lighter). Let's call that 80 lbs to be conservative. The fact that Mazda managed to come up with a folding version that weighs no more than 20 lbs more is pretty spectacular. Especially since it doesn't affect trunk space. Thanks to the fact that the weight is almost exclusively on the rear wheels, it actually has better balance than the soft top to boot.

The Fiat version of the ND also weighs 100 lbs more than the ND soft top, but that weight is on the nose instead of the rear wheels.

Pilot, I would definitely recommend sways to handle the body roll. The suggestion for springs probably comes from owners of cars with the overdamped 16-17 soft top Bilsteins - not many people acknowledge/realize there was a fairly significant damping change in the Bilsteins for the 2017+ RF and 2018+ soft top. In those early cars, the shocks need a stiffer spring to work against. In yours, the springs and shocks are pretty well matched so you'll want sways for roll because that's what sways do!

The red RF should have gold wheels. Always.

You are correct.

Delicious!